Prepare and ace your management interview round. (Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash)
Introduction
In this article, I want to cover the most important questions that will come up in the management round of the onsite interview process for the Engineering Manager roles. I will share some highlights from how I usually answered those questions and some tips for you to take away.
Please note that these are just sample answers to provoke a thought process in you, I don’t believe you can or should use them as is. The key to leadership interviews is authenticity.
Before I share the specifics of the management round, let me quickly list the other most common rounds I saw in my onsite interviews.
Onsite Interview structure
Management round
Focuses on execution strategies, project management methodologies(agile), hiring, feedback, 1–1s, managing underperformance, mentorship, coaching.
Tip: I found Managing for Results to be helpful on Linkedin Learning.
Cross-Functional Interactions
Focuses on negotiation strategies, managing social capital, use of influence, managing priorities, conflict resolution in cross-functionals.
Tip: I found Managing a Cross-Functional Team to be helpful on Linkedin Learning.
Product Interactions
Focuses on the relationship with product management, PM-EM(Product and Engineering Manager) responsibilities, mapping product strategy to engineering strategy, goal setting.
Tip: I have benefited a lot in developing a product minded thinking by watching the Product School videos.
Tech Lead — EM Interactions
Focuses on managing senior, staff, principal engineers, managing high potentials, the role of culture in high performance, growth and retention strategies, rewards, recognition.
System Design, technical discussion
Focuses on the system design of popular product features like Twitter timeline, Twitter Search, Whatsapp, Instagram, TinyURL, etc. As an EM, you will be leading a technical team that builds complex solutions at scale. Make sure you are prepared for this round. Understand from the hiring manager or recruiter beforehand on role expectations.
Tip: The best resource to ace this is round is Educative.io. The second best thing that helped me was reading engineering blogs of world-class companies where they talk about how they solve specific problems, discuss their tech stack.
In this article, I will restrict myself to the management round questions. In itself, it’s a big topic. It will get monotonous to go over all questions, so I will pick a few most asked questions and share my perspectives on each. Hope this inspires some thought processes for you.
Tip: If you want a quick read on the list of questions, I refer you to Vidal Graupera’s latest book on Engineering Manager Interviews. While the book does not talk much about how to answer them, you will get an exhaustive list of questions to prepare.
Management round most asked interview questions
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
Highlights of my answer
Strengths:
- Simplify complexity, simplify the basic human communication, map content to context. Leads to more careful decision making.
- Continuously edit the mindsets in the team to tune for the highest collective intelligence — people change all the time. Tune the collective intelligence of the team for targeted performance
- Listen deeply, act mindfully. Empathetic employee culture with sustained high performance.
Weaknesses/challenges/Hard things (keep in mind this also depends on what kind of support you have from the company in general)
- Managing my social capital when leading cross-functional projects.
- Providing air cover for my team during a time-sensitive execution, handling the uncertainty until the results come.
- Advocating self-awareness, opening people to seek more, be ambitious.
I would build my answer around these by giving specific nuanced examples. I would have an example ready for each of the items on my mental list and expand based on how detailed I was expected to be.
Here’s the truth, leadership interviews are a lot of talking, so you need to watch out for hints on when you need to go into detail and when to stop. Brief and specific always work.
I would also say, “I don’t necessarily see it as a weakness, but more as a challenge”, then start my answer if the interviewer used the word “weakness” in the question.
Things you should think about
Have many examples ready. It takes time to remember examples one each for the type of situation. Do it.
To build my examples, I sat down on a Saturday, noted down all interesting experiences — positive, negative.
After you have a big set of examples ready, select those that can build a diverse case for you. Synthesize your answers to succinctly narrate it to the interviewer. Ask this — What do you want your interviewer to take away from your example? Offer exactly that in your answer.
What according to you is effective delegation?
Highlights of my answer
- Trust is the building block for effective delegation. I need to first establish that trust with my team.
- I try to know both their strengths and areas to improve. The goal is to map their career aspirations to available tasks at hand.
- One way to delegate is that for a given task, find the person who has the strengths in that area who I can trust with quality+completion. Another way is to see if I can delegate the task at hand to someone who has this in his area of improvement thus helping him make progress with his career aspirations. Sometimes there isn’t the time for developing the abilities to complete the task, in which case I communicate that plus start coaching them for the next time.
- There is always more scope for delegation, I think I should do more of it. I used to under-delegate when I started because I was coming from being a fairly successful IC. I am working my way out of it.
Things you should think about
Are there leaders around you that make you want to work for them? Do you feel trusted, challenged, empowered when they delegate tasks to you? Do they keep in mind the growth of the team?
Do you feel micromanaged? Do you feel you are always being assigned tasks for your abilities than your aptitude?
As a manager, you will have a lot of tasks only you can do. Focus on those, delegate the others. The right delegation always benefits the team, not just you as a manager.
Check out Delegating Tasks on Linkedin by Dorie Clark.
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